To celebrate Vikings Live, we have replaced our Roman alphabet with the runic alphabet used by the Vikings, the Scandinavian ‘Younger Futhark’. The ‘Younger Futhark’ has only 16 letters, so we have used some of the runic letters more than once or combined two runes for one Roman letter.

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Gold coins and ingots from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo

One of the most famous groups of objects in the British Museum
is the splendid collection of grave goods from the Anglo-Saxon
ship-burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. This is the burial of an
important warrior, but there is little in the grave to make it
clear who was buried there.

The burial can only be dated on the basis of the coins that were
found there. There was a purse among the burial goods, which
contained 37 gold coins, 3 coin-shaped blanks, and 2 small gold
ingots. The presence of the coin-shaped blanks suggests that the
number of coins was deliberately rounded up to 40.

The coins cannot be dated closely, but seem to have been
deposited at some point between around AD 610 and AD 635. They all
come from the kingdom of the Merovingian Franks on the Continent,
rather than any English kingdom, although coin production had
started in Kent by this time. Sutton Hoo was in the kingdom of East
Anglia and the coin dates suggest that it may be the burial of King
Raedwald, who died around AD 625.

The coins on display in the British Museum are electrotype
copies of the original coins, which are available for study at the
Museum.